Al-Hikmah University Journal

The study examined teachers’ emotional intelligence as correlates of students’ truancy behaviour among secondary school students in Katsina Metropolis, Katsina State. Three research questions and three null hypotheses guided the study; descriptive correlational design was employed for the study. The population for the study was 297 teachers, simple random sampling techniques was used to select 167 respondents. The instruments for data collection were Teachers Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQ), and Students Truancy Behaviour Questionnaires (STBQ). To ensure the validity of the instrument, the instruments were face validated by an expert from Department of Educational Psychology and Counselling. The reliability index of 0.87and 0.73 was obtained from the instruments. The linear correlation, regression and t-test were used to answer the research questions and were also used to test the null hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed the relative importance of each of the predictor variables (teacher’s emotional intelligence and gender) to the prediction of truancy behaviours. The findings of the study show that teacher’s emotional intelligence significantly correlates secondary school student’s truancy behaviours. It is recommended that before a teacher is employed, he or she should be exposed to emotional intelligence seminar. This will help the school management to employ only competent teachers who will develop student’s punctuality habit.